In Brief: WORLD WAR Z (2013)

Did you ever see one of the old time movie serials? The story builds to a climax every fifteen minutes or so and after an implausible escape the story moves on. Now, have you ever seen one of those feature films made by compressing a serial into 90 minutes or less? Usually they have all the cliffhangers while jettisoning much of the exposition and most of what little character development there was in the original. That's what World War Z is like. To be fair, Brad Pitt and Marc Foster have closer to two hours to work with and manage to fit more exposition in. But there's the same sort of perfunctory sensationalism to their production, notoriously troubled but eventually modestly triumphant at the box office. Action scenes -- for this is an action rather than a horror film -- arrive with a telegraphed inevitability that smothers any suspense the filmmakers hoped to generate. Much like the film's "zekes," the film itself is energetically lifeless, taking for granted that our empathy for "family" or our adoration of Pitt will keep us emotionally involved without director, writers or actors really doing anything to engage us. The irony of the project is that the zombie at its heart is Brad Pitt. Repeatedly, Pitt has proven his versatility and charisma as an actor, from the subtle villainy of his Jesse James to his sublime idiocy in Burn After Reading, but his ambition as an actor seems inversely proportional to his ambition, as a producer, to make money. He seems to think that, to be a hero, or at least an action hero, he doesn't have to develop an interesting personality. His protagonist is an automaton, though he looks like a professional wrestler (it's the hair, mainly) bereft of the gift of gab, barely personalized by the era's prevalent reluctant-hero cliches -- yet perversely, this character, if it can be called that, dominates the story in a way that no one, or so I understand, dominates Max Brooks's source novel. As Pitt trots the globe, abortive characters threaten to form around him, only to be abandoned, with the exception of a female Israeli soldier whose infected hand he helpfully amputates during the great bug-out from Jerusalem. You get none of the abrasive interaction of personalities in distress that defines the zombie movie as much as the zombies do. Everyone involved with the project seemed more interested in the novel ways they make the zekes move, but it is all too often rendered from too great a distance and too much in the manner of video games to seem as strange as it's supposed to, let alone frightening. Foster proves incapable of generating real thrills, and his commitment to a PG-13 rating denies viewers even the simplest pleasures (gore, that is) of zombie films. Sure, the fate of the world's at stake, but when isn't it in movies? The real question is, when have you cared less?

George A. Romero's SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2010)

On the DVD, George A. Romero explains that his sixth "Dead" film can be seen as the second film of a trilogy that is already complete. This second trilogy begins chronologically with the second film released of the three, Diary of the Dead, and ends with the first film released, Land of the Dead. They have a character, or at least a performer, in common: Alan Van Sprang, who plays "Brubaker" in Land, an unnamed Colonel who hassles the video crew in Diary, and the same character promoted to the lead in Survival. The new film includes a flashback establishing "Nicotine" Crockett as the same character we saw in Diary, though he's somehow been demoted to Sergeant since then. Sometime in the future, presumably, he'll change his name to become the character glimpsed in Land. This is all very interesting to know, but it isn't essential to appreciating or critiquing Survival, since Crockett is more or less a straight man for his fellow soldiers and the people he encounters on Plum Island, Delaware.

In a way, Survival is a reversal of Day of the Dead, with military folk as the relatively sane ones entering a domain of madness. The similarity extends to an island clan's efforts to tame and train their zombified relatives. That clan, the Muldoons, have driven their old rivals the O'Flynns off the island because patriarch Patrick O'Flynn took a zero-tolerance approach to zombies and the infected. O'Flynn goes online to lure survivors from across the country to Delaware, where he expects either to recruit them for the retaking of Plum or simply to roll them for wealth and weapons. After attempting to ambush Crockett's little band, O'Flynn ends up their ally as the soldiers discover the atrocities committed by the Muldoons. It becomes obvious soon enough that there are no good guys on Plum, except perhaps for O'Flynn's estranged daughter, whose survival after her father's exile is thrown into question.

More than ever for Romero, the zombie threat is just a McGuffin here, a backdrop for a feuding-patriarchs storyline very reminiscent of The Big Country, especially in its conclusion. By now, Romero is clearly having a hard time taking the zombies seriously. They're as gruesome as ever when they make their customary final rush (and when Romero reverts to practical gore effects after economizing on CGI blood earlier), but too often he makes them objects for sight gags. One is shot in the chest by a flare gun; for some reason that ignites its head. Another is force fed from a fire extinguisher until its eyes pop out of its head.

But at the same time some zombies become figures of pathos or a kind of gothic awe. A female zombie on horseback rides through the landscape like a figure out of folklore; the effect is eerily thrilling rather than horrific. But the story is less about the Dead than about the foibles of the living, with a moral Romero drives home with overkill (literally, you might say) in an editorializing, superfluous coda.

Romero's second trilogy doesn't compare with his first, but Survival is a big improvement on the hamfisted Diary, which wasted our time making Romero's who-cares point about our modern obsession with recording ourselves. If Survival doesn't really function as a horror film, despite some chilling moments and excellent exploitation of a dread-inducing landscape, it works for me as a pulpy adventure story with a slight accent of Celtic exoticism and an ensemble cast that performs with guileless conviction. The dialogue is often on a comic-book level, but the actors sell it sincerely, especially Kenneth Welsh as O'Flynn, a figure of malevolent exuberance. As long as you know what to expect (and what not to), Survival of the Dead should provide 90 minutes of undemanding entertainment, with a decent bit of gore for a chaser. You can almost feel Romero's frustration that he can't make films without zombies anymore (and he can barely get those made following the undeserved failure of Land), but he still has a certain genius for making something from next to nothing. The title may sound like an oxymoron, but it may be the director's defiant statement on the state of his career right now.

THE HANGING WOMAN (La Orgia de los Muertos, 1973)

The original Spanish title of Jose Luis Merino's movie translates to "Orgy of the Dead," but that title had already been used in the U.S. by Ed Wood and A. C. Stephen. Actually the American title is a better fit, since there is a prominent hanging woman in the film but not an orgy of the dead, unless you count the scene in which Igor the Gravedigger, reeling in guilt from an encounter with a manipulative living woman, nuzzles his three dead paramours in a crypt and begs forgiveness from them. And that is, inevitably, a rather passive affair for most of the participants.

Igor's a relatively minor character in this story about mysterious deaths and the struggle for control of an estate and the laboratory inside, but he's probably the main reason anyone will buy the newly-released Troma DVD. That's because he's played by the living icon of low-end Spanish horror, the now globally-beloved Paul Naschy. Born Jacinto Molina, Naschy had a Spirit of the Beehive-style epiphany when Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man played in his small town when he was still a child. Instead of projecting his horror fantasies on fugitive rebel soldiers, young Molina responded creatively, concocting his own monster stories and finally emerging as a horror star in the role of Waldemar Daninsky, the eternally recurring lycanthrope. Throughout the 1970s, Naschy played nearly every traditional horror archetype, and this supporting role, done as a favor to the director, takes him close to the territory of cinema's most famous gravedigger, Jose Mojica "Coffin Joe" Marins. But Naschy puts his own spin on the gravedigger character, which he was allowed to rewrite to his own satisfaction, by making him a passionate necrophiliac, one who can only be attracted to living women when they pretend to be dead, like the wicked widow Nadia, who has some use for poor Igor.

"Ick... You're alive!!!" A disgusted Paul Naschy recoils from life in The Hanging Woman.

Nadia was married to Count Mihaly, whose funeral opens the film. She got the shaft in the count's will, with most of the estate going to his daughter Mary, who we find invading his crypt in search of a mysterious document left on his person. A shadow overtakes her suddenly, and we cut to the arrival of Serge Chekov in the Macedonian town of Skopje. This may confuse purchasers of the DVD, which claims that Serge will arrive in a Scottish village. But Scotland, Skopje, what's the difference, right? Anyway, Serge grumps his way through town, fearful of robbers, until he hears suspicious noises in a cemetery. He then drops his bags and goes inside, gun in hand in search of danger. When he emerges, his bags are surprisingly where he left them, but there's also a Hanging Woman, who happens to be Mary.

As Paul Naschy helpfully explains in an interview, Stan Cooper (right) "was an Italian actor who called himself Stan Cooper." What more need be said?

Mary's demise actually puts Serge in line to control the estate, which makes him a focus of suspicion in her death. It also makes the people of the estate interested in his welfare. These include Nadia and Ivan the Butler, who has bedroom privileges with the mistress, as well as Prof. Leon Droila and his daughter Doris, another of Nadia's servants. Serge establishes his dominance by casting out Ivan and making him dance to a bullet beat, cowboy style. It develops that Nadia would like to make her fortune by selling the estate, while Prof. Leon wants the family to keep it so he can continue some experiments he'd collaborated on with Count Mihaly. The Prof. is the Herbert West of Macedonia, having managed to reanimate a dead frog by "plac[ing] it under a charge superior to what it had when it was alive." This intrigues Serge, who can't help wanting to see that frog at full power. He proves himself rather a prick by persuading poor Doris to strip for him as if she'd need to offer herself to him for her dad to keep his lab, but we see him growing a wee bit of conscience by making the tearful girl get dressed "before I begin to feel guilty over all this." From this point we are to accept him as the hero of the picture.

An interesting angle to the story is Nadia's dabbling in spiritualism and the dark arts. She jabs needles into voodoo dolls and suggests a seance to contact the spirits of the recently killed to find out who offed them. As it happens, the late Count Mihaly accepts the invitation, but embraces Nadia a tad too enthusiastically, strangling her. He arrived, of course, not courtesy of spirits but through science! Things deteriorate from here. Igor, who'd seen it all from his peeping-tom nook, goes more nuts than normal and runs away before being overtaken by a shadow like the one that took care of Mary. He's found stuffed inside a stone wall, the message, "No 37" written in his own blood on a wall. Despite Doris's corroboration of the attack by the dead, and Serge's sighting of other walking dead (including Ivan, and who knew he'd even been killed?) Serge is blamed for both Nadia's demise and Igor's. He's held in his own house, handcuffed to a bed, pondering all the weirdness and the significance of "No 37" until he views it from the right angle and solves the mystery. Of course, he still has the dead to deal with, and their master....

I watched The Hanging Woman with a friend who likes horror movies but doesn't care for Euro-horror as a rule. He thought it did a good job of misdirection on the mystery side and he admired the atmosphere of the ruinous locations. That matched my own impression. It's on too small a scale to live up to its ballyhoo, but still manages modest entertainment. Naschy is often tangential to the main story, appearing as something of an added attraction who does his thing with the dead, attacks Serge every so often and gets chased around a lot before becoming one of the dead ones. He brings a barnstorming intensity to his scenes that most of the other actors lack, and he makes Igor a believably sick and almost sympathetic character. You can understand from this relatively small sample why the man has a following today. As Serge, Stan Cooper (a stage name for one Stelvio Rosi) does some scenery chewing of his own, coming across in looks and manner as if Chuck Norris circa 1979 were playing Basil Rathbone's part in Son of Frankenstein the way Rathbone played it. As the eventual villain, Gerard Tichy segues effectively from calm authority to calm menace even as he offers ludicrous explanations for the undead phenomena. It has less to do with the reanimation apparatus we saw earlier than with capsules inserted into moribund brains that respond to thought patterns. Maria Pia Conte as Nadia and Dyanik Zurakowska as Doris have an entertainingly bitchy relationship for a mistress and maid, adding to the somewhat campy fun of the film.

La Orgia de los Muertos isn't a major item in Spanish horror or Paul Naschy's filmography, but for people looking for fresh vintage horror this October it's hard to go wrong with Troma's bargain-basement DVD, which includes interviews with Naschy and the director, who also contributes a commentary track -- and a second Spanish feature, a black-and-white item called The Sweet Sound of Death that I'll review later. Naschy fans and Spanish horror buffs are sure to enjoy it, and more general Euro-horror enthusiasts may like it as well.

Here's a new trailer Troma put together to promote the DVD, which contains the original U.S. trailer in rather rough shape.